As part of my Honours research, I’ve been experimenting with some simple artificial life algorithms as part of the game I’m making as part of assessment.
Below you will find some early tests showing the behaviour of algorithms for algae propagation, ground fertility, and organism flocking:
I finally put up the trailer for your viewing pleasure:
I spent the last couple of days refactoring the old market system from something ugly and difficult to modify…
The old market interface
…into something modular and user-friendly.
The most recent of many iterations of market interface designs
After I got almost all the systems back up and running properly, I thought it would be a good idea to sit a completely new player in front of it and see what they do:
In fairness, towards the middle of it I had to say ‘scroll the mouse wheel while dragging something’ to get him to use the quantity control, so I will have to put in some sort of tooltip that gives that suggestion once then disappears once you do it.
I finally got around to visually skinning the pits and adding pretty much all the UI features and feedback that I had wanted. And as far as I can tell, no bugs in that department at this stage.
Observe (and ignore the terrified pedestrian that is bugging out in the middle of the workshop – I will fix that):
Now, just seventy-two million, eight hundred and forty-one thousand, six hundred and nine things left to do before the content lock-off at alpha.
Because humanity is composed entirely of sadistic bastards and locksmiths, I’d thought I’d provide an update on how the ped violence is coming along:
I’ve just done some initial tests of the iPiSoft DMC (desktop motion capture) software with three webcams and my laptop.
The results are promising:
UPDATE:
The results are definitely not perfect.
There is quite a bit of shaking (although I have to yet to try out the ‘remove jitter’ option), and it does seem to have a tendency to lose track of a hand every now and then. And whenever my feet pass close to each other there’s a chance it will get them mixed up.
But to be fair, I am using the minimum number of cameras, with quite baggy and ruffled dull-colour pants that build up around my shoes. I had thought my dreads would pose a problem, but they don’t appear to be directly related to the misses I’m seeing.
It is probably a bad thing that I’m doing it with only one light source that is blasting in from the one side to create very visible shadows where my feet hit the ground, and of course making the colour of my clothes much darker on one side of my body.
What I really need is my brother’s bright purple skinny jeans…
Now that’s more like it:
Semi-Automated Tile-Based Level-Building System
With Yena’s texture randomisation scripts integrated, I think it is now a much more useful level building tool – place a bunch of cubes, tag them as ‘buildingCube’, then hit ‘interpret’.
Perhaps most importantly, using this system you can construct a level out of cubes very quickly, and then just drive around in it to see how it feels and how it plays before actually committing to it and doing all the extra work of turning it into a proper level.
So it should increase the quality of the levels produced (assuming it is used in this way).
